Philippine translation and validation of the Wearing-off Questionnaire-19

INTRODUCTION: The 19-item Wearing-Off questionnaire is used as a self-administered questionnaire assessing wearing-off (WO) in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Thus, we aim to translate and validate the WOQ-19 into Filipino (FWOQ-19). METHODS: We translated the WOQ-19 questionnaire into Filipino and used it to assess WO among Filipino PD patients. The original WOQ-19 was translated into Filipino using forward and backward translation by independent bilingual translators. WO is present if the patients checked at least 2 symptoms in the WOQ-19. Baseline demographic data, disease duration and medication use were collected. Internal consistency was measured using Cronbach's alpha. The Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) part IV and WOQ-32 were correlated with FWOQ-19 through Pearson's correlation coefficient to assess construct validity. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: The FWOQ-19 was answered by 46 patients. The mean age of the participants was 60.8 ± 10.0 years (range, 40–86 years). The mean duration of PD was 10.9 ± 3.1 years (range, 1–26 years). Majority (n = 38, 82%) of patients claimed that WO is predictable and only 2 of the patients claimed that WO is unpredictable. The rest of the patients (n = 6, 13%) said that they did not experience WO. The internal consistency of the FWOQ-19 is acceptable (Cronbach's alpha 0.7808). There is a high correlation between WOQ-32 and FWOQ-19 (r = 0.8191). The troublesome symptoms for the patients were tremor, insomnia, weakness and slowness. CONCLUSION: The FWOQ-19 is a valid assessment tool for detecting wearing-off among Filipino-speaking PD patients.